


April Fools

by crocodilepatronus



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DC Comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 09:57:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4175544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crocodilepatronus/pseuds/crocodilepatronus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sexy prank calls and existential musings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	April Fools

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Are](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Are/gifts).



Batman watched the clock turn from 11:59 P.M., March 31 to 12:00 A.M., April 1 on the electric clock on Gordon’s desk. The phone rang. It was for him- the rest of the building was empty. He’d climbed in through the window and sat waiting all through the night, silent and still as one of the shadows stretched across the floor, for the the sound of the phone. He picked it up on the second ring and didn’t say hello.

“It’s the best day of the year again.” the voice on the other end purred. It was hard to distinguish, if his voice came out with that edge of distortion because of the phone connection or because it was how he’d always sounded- fuzzy and far away, as if his speaking voice was a transmission from another reality. But always too familiar- one he could’ve picked from any crowd, the one that narrarated his dreams more than his own voice.

“Isn’t everyday April Fools for you…?” Batman asked calmly after a pause.

The Joker’s snickering on the other end sounded even more distant, as if the phone was being loosely held and the noise coming through was bouncing around before it got to Batman’s receiver.

“I’m….” the voice was stretched tight, cracked and with an edge of near desperation to it. “I’m going to kill a lot of people today.” the strained, one octave too high, sound could have been from someone holding back tears or holding back laughter. And then he couldn’t hold back anymore in erupted into hysterics of raspy, screeching, cackling.

Batman sat back in the commisioner’s chair, resting his head against the back and holding the receiver away from his ear a few inches waiting for the outburst to die down.

“Is there any better joke in the world?! As classic as the chicken crossed the road!” the joker wheezed.

“In case you haven’t noticed already, I don’t find it particularly amusing.” Batman replied dryly.

The laughter died down abruptly and was replaced after a pause by a long, drawn out, sigh.

“You don’t think **_anything_** ’s funny, Bats.” he muttered with annoyance. He inhaled deeply and seemed to regain his cheerfulness.

“Soooo~” he trilled then pressed his mouth closer to the speaker and crooned “What are you wearing…?”

“A mask, a black cape, and a utility belt.” Batman answered deadpan.

“Very chic! And… What would you be doing if I was there with you right now…?” the Joker managed to say, seductful tone in tact even as he fought to restrain the giggles escaping between words.

“Punching you in the face.” Batman said easily.

“Ooh! Saucy! I always knew you liked it rough, Batsy!” the Joker screeched.

Batman sighed, tapping his fingers on the edge of the desk impatiently until the other had quieted down enough to hear him.

“Where are you right now?” he asked calmly.

“Mmmmm? Isn’t that cheating? Shouldn’t you be asking me to give you a hint? I’ll be a good sport and give you a hint anyway,” the Joker cackled. From the other end of the line a sound like a metallic swish cutting through the air came through and then a stifled grunt, not the Joker’s, and the sound of liquid dripping heavily on concrete. “I have often walked…. down this street before…” the Joker began singing. His voice going from falsetto highs to deep, bellowing lows.

“Joker…” Batman started.

“But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before….!” the Joker sang over him, loudly. Several gunshots. A body, sliding wetly down a wall. “ALL AT ONCE AM I-” the phone clattered to the floor as the Joker dragged the handset with him as he walked. “SEVERAL STORIES HIGH.”

Batman stood up.

“Knowing I’m…. on the street… where you live…” the Joker finished, purring with his lips pressed up against the phone.

“I’m coming for you.” Batman said simply before dropping the phone handset on the desk and climbing out the window, maneuvering across the fire escape and down to the alley below.

The empty commissioner’s office echoed with the noise dully still coming through the phone’s off the hook receiver.

“And ohh… the towering feeling… just to know, somehow you are near… the overpowering feeling, that any second you may suddenly appear…. dum dum dum dum…. dum dum dum….”

\- - - - -

To say Batman knew Gotham like the back of his hand was an understatement. People didn’t know the back of their own hands as well as one might expect. Bruce Wayne certainly didn’t spend much time at all inspecting his own. To say he knew Gotham like the back of his hand would’ve meant he knew every freckle’s location on his hand, every groove and wrinkle to his skin, the pathway of every vein.

The Joker’s psyche was easily as familiar though not as easily navagated. If figuring out the Joker’s plots was a labirynth it was one that changed shape and direction with every step taken, constantly reforming and collapsing in on itself at a rate faster than one could understand even the fundamentals before having the rules changed and the foundation of their understanding pulled out beneath them. If a word had to be applied to Batman’s familiarity with the Joker’s way of thinking it would more likely be “spiritual” connection than any logical grip on a pattern of behavior. Batman would never have used “spiritual” to describe the relationship, possibly “intuitive” would be more likely though the word falls short.

But spiritual, too, and especially to Batman, sounds inorganic and tenuous.

When in reality the connection between Batman and the Joker was as organic and primitive as if outgrowths of nerve fibers, from the tips of their fingers and toes and out the back of their brain stems, connected their bodies together like string, so that each one felt the other’s movements like a tug on their own being.

Comparatively, the city itself felt much more insubstantial- just made of smoke and shadows that were gone the minute you closed your eyes, blocked your ears. But the bond shared between the two men- _that_ sustained itself even through unconsciousness.

Batman knew the Joker wasn’t actually on the street where he lived, because the Joker didn’t know where he lived and likely didn’t care. That was where “Bruce” lived not “Batman” and therefore had no relevance. But his hint did not narrow down Batman’s options very much- in the Joker’s mind and in “Batman’s” mind, every street was his. Every place where there was a shadow in Gotham, or a dark corner where you couldn’t see behind you, that was where the entity of Batman resided.

It was nearly 2 AM when Batman finished looking through the midtown area. The streets were still dark, even the clouds blocked out by the smog and dark clouds that predicted storms for the day covering the moon. The beginning of April was still like winter, the nights were long. It suited Batman fine- he didn’t like early mornings and late sunsets. They threw off his work schedule.

He retraced the Joker’s steps by starting at Arkham. He heard from the orderlies there (or at least the one smoking a cigarette by the gate who seemed as reliable a source as any) what he’d predicted that the Joker had ‘checked himself out’ the night before with a hidden razor blade and a stolen uniform.

It was 3 AM when he found the bodies by the harbor, faces contorted with forced smiles from their death throes. There were five men who worked at the dock, their bodies already stiff and their faces purpled. They were propped up like marionettes in a huge pile of dead fish. In blood on the wall was written “POISSON D’AVRIL!”

There was no phone near the harbor, though, so Batman assumed the Joker had had his laugh and then left, moving on to new pranks.

At 5 AM Batman found that hanging above several sky scrapers in the city there was a simple pulley system set up, not yet activated, to drop anvils on the heads of people walking below at different places. He disarmed them and moved on.

At 9 AM he went back to the police department and removed car bombs from the bottom of several officer’s cars after catching one of the joker’s henchmen in the act. It was convenient that he didn’t have to take an extra trip to turn him in. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the Joker was.

Batman had already tried the usual hiding spots but in reality he knew that there was nothing “usual” about the Joker and that old haunts would not be returned to unless for ironic, satirical purposes. He was beginning to get annoyed at his own incompetence and wondered if the problem was that his sense of humor was not refined enough to have the first clue of where a homicidal maniac might want to hide on April Fools.

At 12 AM the Joker showed his face but it wasn’t to Batman, it was a brief cameo on live television- a news broadcast that showed security footage of the Joker and a team of clown faced henchmen handing out balloons in the park then, once a fair distance away, popping them with bullets and releasing the poisonous gas inside.

Two had died, five had been rushed to the hospital. It wasn’t a good day for going to the park. Despite the whimsical holiday, the weather was grim. Dark storm clouds blocked out the sunlight, and thunder without rain or lightning rumbled through the sky like a gurgle through the belly of a beast that the city lay in the stomach of.

At 4 PM it rained briefly and Batman interrogated people in crime alley about the joker from under buildings’ overhanging eaves while puddles formed in the pot holes by his feet.

\- - -

Whether by coincidence, for satirical purpose, or from whatever spiritual, intuitive, anatomic, connection between them- when Batman did find the Joker that night it was literally on the street where he lived, in an abandoned building far away but still on the same route as Wayne Manor.

\- - -

The door of the abandoned building crashed inward with a cloud of splinters and dust.

“Knock knock.” he said.

The Joker looked up, perched on the edge of a beaten down and half burnt desk, a grin plastered over his painted face.

“Who’s there?” he trilled.

Batman punched him in the nose. He used the force to propel him forward, knocking his own and the Joker’s body to the ground just as his henchman reached their guns and began spraying bullets at him.

Behind the flimsy cover of the desk, the Joker wriggled fitfully under Batman’s weight, one hand already locked around his neck, squeezing half heartedly. The other hand didn’t take long to find the switchblade in his pocket and Batman barely had time to dodge before it narrowly missed slicing across his ribs.

As he sat up to avoid the radius of the Joker’s knife’s range he threw three batarangs, effectively knocking out four of the six henchman, without so much as a glance in their direction.

In terms of physical prowess, the two were unevenly matched. Batman could’ve killed Joker with his bare hands without breaking a sweat.

But what the Joker lacked in muscles or martial arts he made up with pure ruthlessness and unpredictability. In a hand to hand fight he scared off most by his challengers with pure intimidation- he carried an attitude that suggested that you could beat him into unconsciousness but not before he’d take a piece of you with him, and it wasn’t just a boast.

In Arkham even devoid of weapons, the Joker could take out men much larger and stronger himself by doing what those in their right minds would not- clawing his fingers directly into their eyesockets and ripping out the vitreous substance with his fingernails, breaking his own arm to remove himself from a death grip, biting his opponents until they were mutilated…. And no fight did he show more reckless abandon in than those with the Batman.

He swung the knife in a wide arc, aimlessly as Batman dodged, skillfully. Batman was all skill- but that also made him predictable. Batman caught his wrist and twisted until the knife was pointing away from him. The Joker snarled and whipped his knee up into the center of Batman’s stomach, hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and loosen the grip on his wrist. The blade cut one thin line across Batman’s arm, leaving a thin slice of fabric and then the Joker was on his feet again, with Batman below him and still on his knees.

The Joker’s knee lashed out again, narrow and boney, this time across Batman’s jaw. He spotted the gun he dropped a few feet away and dove for it.

Batman stood up only to be met by gunfire of the remaining two henchmen. He pulls his cape around him, as effective as a smoke bomb in the small, dimly lit, space in disconcerting his enemies as he swooped toward them.

Bullets don’t scare him anymore. It’s not that he’s not bulletproof, it’s that shooters generally tend not to be Batman-proof.

It only takes a second to duck under the shooter’s range and before they have time to correct, Batman had twisted the arm of one man until it broke, the gun dropping uselessly to the ground, simultaneously putting the lower half of his body to use by kicking the second shooter unconscious with one blow.  

By the time he turned around, the Joker was already standing across from him, revolver in hand and pointed at Batman’s head. The air between was filled with the scent of gunpowder and the rank, stagnant, mildew that clung to the walls of most of the abandoned buildings of Gotham.

They both knew the gun would not be effective.

The Joker was already out of breath, blood from his nose dripping down his lips and chin and mingling with the red of the paint on his lips.

“Really,” the Joker said, breathless, “This show never gets old.”

One batarang knocked the gun from his hands, sending it a few feet away. Three quick strides and Batman was grabbing the Joker by the collar of his shirt, lifting him off the ground.

They stared eachother in the face, both their faces covered but more their own than they were undisguised. Two horrors.  

Despite it all, they can never know how it feels to be the other. There is frustration in that. In fact, there is agony in that. Batman can never reach inside and turn off the switch that makes the Joker mad. In turn, the Joker can never rip Batman open from the ribs and inhabit the darkness he knows he would find there, try as he might.

Batman felt the rise and fall of the Joker’s chest and clenched his fist around the fabric of his shirt, pulling him until the tips of his toes were just barely brushing against the floor. The Joker’s face always looked terrifying up close- a clown should be seen from the distance of the stands, not mere inches away where the seam of his makeup is visible against his hairline and the colors strain the eyes.

He reached one hand out, untrimmed fingernails scratched down the armor plating of Batman’s chest with a horrible sound. A mad smile began to twitch back across his lips, and Batman could feel the laughter bubbling up in his chest before it came out his mouth. It lasted a few seconds before his mouth opened wider, his jaw stretching to its limit as he bellowed at the top of his lungs, so loud the building echoed endlessly with it:

“ALL AT ONCE AM IIIII….. SEVERAL STORIES HIGH…….!”

Batman dropped him wordlessly until his feet were flat on the ground again.  

“It’s April 2nd now, you know.” Batman said.

“It was an alright year.”

“I took down the anvil traps and removed the bomb from Commissioner Gordon’s car.”

“Did you?” Joker gasped in exaggerated surprise. “Well in that case- it was terrible!”

Batman pulled a pair of handcuffs from his utility belt and snapped them around the Joker’s narrow wrists.

“Until next year then.” he said.

The Joker grinned widely at him. “Oh Bats,” he said, clicking his tongue. “You said it yourself- every day is April Fools for me.”

 


End file.
